The Stark Gray Consciousnesses So Far Away From Our Sickly Yellow Home
by knospi
Summary: You looked toward the sky and asked for the stars and moon to accept you. I, with my rough dirty badger fur, passively hoped for you to succeed. You were ignored, but one star, far far away, already dead but for the tiny stream of light straggling through space at 299,792,458 meters per second just to reach me, heard me. We were connected forever.
1. IT WAS NOVEMBER

INTRODUCTION:

Please pay the utmost attention to the chapter titles, for they may be the only thing holding this story into any form of coherence.

IT WAS NOVEMBER.

And then she slid from the frigid metal encasing the car door into the even more frigid winter air. She saw frost on the kitchen window before she saw the real, dry brick wall before her. The car drove away from her as she shut the door. She saw the kids huddled before her through her breath's fog. She saw her own name in the kid to her left, who came before her in roll call – "Selphie." In future years, it would become that of a joke, her name, but in the now, it was like the name of a naiad laughing as she slips into the clear water, beyond your sight.

And so following, Selphie swept her gaze to the right. The scene was dismal: empty concrete between a school drop-off lane and that dry dry wall. Middle school students trapped outside on a November morning because no one would bother to supervise them inside. The sun rose over the school so Selphie could see only the pale blue sky and no bright white sun, not that she would look at it anyway. All her peers shivered in the shadows – but there! In front of her lay a student casting their own shadow in the 7:15 AM school-shadow, collapsed as they were against the wall. As she approached, she recognized the signature $5.00 purple headphones sold at Shopko to fall apart days later in true eccentric Selphie-detail-observation fashion.

So she approached faster, so she could jumper cable the kid A.S.A.P, while they still had their eyes closed. But then she noticed the grass-dew all over the front of the kid's shoes so she stopped and walked away. Grey eyes watched her walk away, but no one could tell because the eye-whites were also gray in the shadows, and no one was looking anyway. Selphie trapped one of the stupidly late dandelion buds hanging over the edge of the sidewalk from the withering grass beneath her shoe and its little stringy yellow-and-white polleny guts spilled, crushed with waxy green petals, in her path, and she didn't look back as she traveled to the back of the school where the teachers parked and the dumpsters rotted and the asphalt was cracked and she could watch the sun rise over the distant tree-row.

She never came so stupidly-early again.


	2. IT WAS NOVEMBER, AGAIN

IT WAS NOVEMBER, AGAIN.

Asphalt and concrete are cold in the morning, and so they are too at 7:00 (night) when the streetlights glow yellow and everyone feels lonely, like that guy walking down the bridge with the plastic bag. Selphie was soon destined to fill that role. She was at the big Kwik Trip where you could see the gray cold river with the giant mutated catfish from the parking lot. The trees across masked rusting train cars from the moon, and the abandoned GM car factory ruled over the valley. It was cold and dark and the full moon made it feel even harsher. The bare trees cowered. The stains on the gutters from the leaf-pickup were like phantoms' blood.

Inside the convenience store, Selphie grabbed a neon green-and-yellow cellophane bag of FUNYUNS, ARTIFICAL ONION RING SNACK, and shoved a smaller Doritos bag up her sweatshirt sleeve while no one was watching. Her personal opinion was that paying for something from Pepsi Co Frito-Lays would cancel out the shoplifting, like hairdryers cancel out shower-hair. The satisfaction vs. the hair damage was functionally similar to how she would get more food from the experience, and no one else would profit, not even her blood pressure. The world is fantastic and beautiful.

Between the punched-metal shelves and cardboard candy cases, she saw grey eyes that looked formless in the shadows.

She bought the funyuns at the green counter and wandered off into the lonely frigid darkness down the bridge with her plastic bag.


	3. IT IS OFTEN NOVEMBER

IT IS OFTEN NOVEMBER

November is the month called No School November – the month with no school. Presumably, in Chemistry honors, many tests were given before the breaks, and they were turned in on the teacher's creaky metal desk. In sophomore Functional Math, for those who didn't appreciate Algebra I, there was a lot of review, just like the rest of the year. The girl three seats right of Selphie was eating hot cheetos, making Selphie's nose smell like hot cheetos dust and off-white bedroom carpet for no good reason.

Her eyes saw THEM, because their leg was illuminated blue-white by the flip phone tap-tap-tapping beside them. Grey irises in gray eye whites stared back at her through gray-brown hair, all underneath the gray dead fluorescent ceiling light. Since it was not 2008 and no longer 1998, everything was gray and white and blue modern instead of gray-Easter-colors modern.

Minutes passed and Functional Math flew out of the darkened gray room into the stark white-wall and blue-carpet hall, where straight people kissed among the plastic-locked fire extinguishers on the wall like it was their right. That's right. Straight people in high school exchanging mouth germs and body fluids and wiping each others' butt lint right off their partner's jeans. I need not further explain how disgusting this habit is.

To recenter herself, Selphie wiped imaginary bright red hot cheetos dust on gray-eye gray-hoodie just as she accidentally stepped on their shoe, stabbing her bony Selphie index finger into a similarly bony shoulder blade. Her reaching out like that was, in the first place, really fucking weird, but the addition of her clumsiness was unbearably awkward. Therefore, Selphie grabbed the straps of gray-hoodie's dirty purple backpack and twirled them around (smacking a few bystanders in the process) so she could get a big eyeful of pointy chin (unflattering height discrepancy) and say "Sorry!" with no apology whatsoever.

Mistakes are only permissible when you control the outcome.

Gray-gray-gray-anti-modern-half-a-foot-taller's gray-eyes-widened, damning-this-victim-to-only-see-all-the-pissed-punks-behind-this-widely-unnecessary-roadblock tried to say, "Ok," and leave, but short-short-short with long-neon-blue-fingernails refused.

And that is how Squall Leonhart became cursed.


	4. IT WAS NO LONGER NOVEMBER

IT WAS NO LONGER NOVEMBER

May means the big clumps of flowers on people's roadside lilacs are perfuming the wet streets while the grass is still trying to shove its way through the ice-chunk soil. The leaves are almost done pushing out their delicate satin leaves, and the robin chirps happily after it wins its prize from the ubiquitous mud. Violets and dandelions bloom in the yards of the tolerant, grannies' waxy tulips lurk in the shadows, and every neutral-shade ranch house had a row of daffodils.

Today was an unbearably beautiful day to gaze at the puddles on the cheap sand in untouched elementary school baseball diamonds. The chill was refreshing. Selphie spotted a squirrel carcass oozing on the road, and had a sudden vision of grabbing it and making it mime dancing. Before she managed to banish the thought, she realized that the squirrel, trapped in her mind's clutches, was terribly symbolic of today, this wonderful day where she had to walk back from school because her adoptive mom was in the hospital after a suicide attempt.

Neither her (Selphie's mom) no Selphie herself had gone back to their home since that day. Mom, because she was an inpatient on suicide watch and not allowed to leave the hospital; Selphie, because she didn't want to. She was couch surfing with school friends, but she was really starting to overstay her welcome. She could tell this from "her friends'" stony faces, but she really didn't want to face the fruit flies inevitably swarming around the dishes in her sink from 2 weeks ago, among other things.

"My mom's bloody vomit has probably bred with the linoleum in my bathroom, or become in grained in the grout," said the Selphie of 2 hours ago, gently and vulnerably. Loud peers walked past her in the entryway.

"Um...," Selphie could see the thought on her friend's face, which was upsetting in its own right. Not even her thick, long, dark red-brown hair could excuse it, although it certainly had poignant worth. "I could, um..." this friend started, but she was then dragged away, giggling, by that guy with the greasy hair and tripp pants. God how Selphie hated that guy.

This event and the many leading up to it meant only one person was available for this important favor.

Squall.

As horrifying as that was to admit.

Actually, Squall would have been Selphie's first choice if they hadn't been impossible to track down ever since they graduated early last January. The last time Selphie had seen Squall had been in April at the laundromat during a rainstorm. She'd handed Squall some Fritos as she watched her clothes tumble around, since she knew that Squall only had their rusting Buick for a house, and that meant no stocked pantry.

As well, Squall never answered any of your texts (asshole alert), but Selphie was pissed enough about her mom's impending "Sorry, honey, the doctors aren't letting me out for you graduation, at least since the last time I found a coat hanger," so she texted them anyway.

 _Squall, could you help me clean my mom's sleeping-pill-and-bile refuse out of my bathroom? I haven't gone home for 2 weeks._

It's amazing what you'll admit when you don't think anyone will reprimand you.

Anyway, that's what Selphie would have said if Selphie text-speak wasn't riddled with typos and sentences so short and bare of information that no one knew what on Earth she was trying to say. Selphie _loved_ texting.

She was very surprised 5 hours later, when Squall texted back _ok._

/A.N. The "I killed my dinner, with karate/kick 'em in the face, taste the body" lyric in the Walnut Whales version of The Book of Right-On sounds exactly like Selphie, and... it has harp!


	5. POSSUM HOUSEHOLD

SQUALL'S GRAY HOODIE SMELLED LIKE PINE SOL

Selphie was sitting on the toilet when she received that text. The white porcelain was eerily illuminated by her phone screen and, if she had not been looking down, she would have seen the tiny house spider spinning a delicate house spider web right over her right ear. The floor was so cold. Such are the homes of friends who shelter you while you run from your problems. She was avoiding the family for whom she was becoming a nuisance just like she avoided everything else.

Squall's message was the first thing in those wee nighttime bathroom hours reminding Selphie of her reality. Squall always dealt deftly and absently with reality. It was rather infuriating, so Selphie got mad and pretended that she had been asleep by not replying until morning, not like Squall noticed.

And then it was the next day. Selphie was wearing a cheap turtleneck and shivering in the sharp chill spring wind. She leaned against a concrete pillar in front of the Dollar Store by the Job Center and watched a seagull try to fly against the wind. The thing really wanted some abandoned Taco Bell sack across the parking lot, but it was just hovering in midair, stalled, going neither forward nor backwards, just wasting energy and time.

The plastic bag at Selphie's side held a gallon of bleach and a pack of sponges (she didn't really know how to intensively clean anything). The sky was clear, blue, and hazy. The sun made everything too bright to look at. Selphie stared at the baby plants growing in the big square concrete containers with all the cheap potting soil as she rolled someone's dead cigarette underneath her foot. Little bits of gravel clacked along with her restlessness. She was waiting for Squall to pick her up because the bleach was too heavy to lug around, but they were taking forever.

Just as she was getting bored enough to start staring at the sun so she could watch the gray spots in her eyes dance around, a car pulled into the huge, hole-ridden commercial parking lot. The Taco Bell bag was still fluttering lightly in the breeze until the car's tires crushed it. Squall pulled up in front of her and turned off the car, which was kind of rude, like Selphie was too stupid to push clothes out of the passenger seat and climb in before the car idled long enough to waste gas, but whatever. It was Squall, and "whatever" was the key point of everything about them. As she opened the door, a bit of seagull down blew into her hair.

When Squall started the car up again, Selphie safely contained within, there wasn't any music playing. As the silence stretched from 5 seconds to 5 minutes, Selphie got more and more repulsed. At 5 minutes and 27.8304 seconds, she snapped and turned on the radio. It worked perfectly well, so why it wasn't on, she would never know. All she could think was, "What the fuck, Squall." There are some things that we, as a species, are meant to endure, but car silence was not one of them.

Unfortunately, as soon as a song had gotten far enough in to be recognizable, they had pulled into Selphie's trailer park. The baby leaves overhead rustled lightly. The plants living in the pavement cracks were as alive as everything else.

As Squall's car stopped in front of her house (Squall had been there before and didn't need directions), Selphie noticed the telltale dirt scattered to the side of a broken lattice otherwise covering the crawlspace. How fitting that some creature had found shelter in her home as abandoned it. The plastic bag between her feet rustled as she got out of the car.

When Selphie opened the door to her house, she realized two things immediately:

She had forgotten to lock the door, Jesus Christ what an idiot, and

It smelled dusty and overall vile in there. Plan in the future to avoid nasty airless humid bathrooms.

But she bravely went inside anyway.

Squall sat crouched behind her, ripping up scraggly dandelions growing within the road amongst more gravel and discarded cigarettes. They looked up as Selphie opened the door, froze and went in. As she walked, her hair flapped like wings.


	6. 1853, THE YEAR JESUS WAS BORN

1853, THE YEAR JESUS WAS BORN

Selphie and Squall were sitting on Selphie's mother's bed by the kitchen. Squall was picking at hairs on the bedspread and tossing them onto the scratchy brown carpet; Selphie was watching fruitless dance around, their 2-week-old paper plates fodder stolen away and thrown into a distant dumpster. It was humid and Selphie's palms were sweating. She spoke,

"You know, they normally try to kick attempted-suicide patients out of the hospital as soon as possible because they don't want lawsuits. But my mom wouldn't stop instigating shit, like trying and succeeding to get other patients to find her stuff to kill herself with when the nurses weren't looking. She was only supposed to be in there for a few days for observation, but she kept getting more hurt and her therapist is making them transfer her, so she's stuck there for weeks."

Squall didn't look at her, but asked, slightly morbidly, "What did she do?"

Selphie looked at them very strangely and said "Um, I already told you?"

Squall answered in monotone, "I mean to get into the hospital n the first place."

"She swallowed most of a 600-tablet bottle of ibuprofen and a bunch of thumbtacks. Ibuprofen won't kill you, but it will make your stomach dissolve itself. It is extremely painful. Obviously the tacks didn't help.

"It burned like hell, so she called an ambulance.

"They were just going to have her go in for daily appointments to make sure that the tacks weren't embedding in her intestines after they made her swallow charcoal for the ibuprofen, but obviously it didn't work out that way." _Her cowardice and search for pleasure have left me abandoned._

Squall didn't say anything more, but that was more their personality than actual speechlessness. After a few minutes, Selphie started to get off the bd to start on the bathroom. With her first step on the floor, an opossum's foot, mimicking her own, emerged from beneath the bed. Another step, another foot, now accompanied by a pointy possum head. After the past few weeks, Selphie was a bid dead, so she just stared in horror. Squall let out a little strangled scream.

The possum looked Selphie straight in the eyes and fucking smiled. Have you ever seen an opossum's mouth? Yeah. It was so horrifying that Selphie immediately hoped that this was some kind of terrible dream, especially when the damn thing started laughing.

"You should smooth down the hole in the floor under the bed if you want me to let you live here too," it said with some freakish accent created by vocal chords not made for human speech.

Squall resumed their strangled scream, which was ok because Selphie knew that they didn't like animals, or humans. or books, or tomatoes. God how Squall hated tomatoes.

(" _If you spend all your time at the library in winter, what do you do?" she had asked once. "Read?"_

 _"Haha,"— Squall actually said "haha", they rarely laughed for real— "That's a good one.")_

Anyway, Selphie had owned a monstrously large golden hamster once, so she could do this.

"This is my house, asshole," she said.

That's how you interact with animals.

"Someone created a nice dark home and abandoned it. I wanted it, so it became mine, like the air in my lungs and the bugs in the breeze. I snap them up to survive, and this pleases me," said the possum.

With the thing's poetry, Squall got up and speed walked into Selphie's room. (Mom was kind enough to sleep in the kitchen space and allow Selphie her own room.)

"This is my house. I've lived here for 12 years. You can't just take it from me. I pay the rent!" Sort of.

"I eat the brown mice with little white bellies that filch your bread, and I feast upon the slugs that mark your path. Why do I anger you so?"

"Your teeth, they frighten me. Your bristly fur disgusts me."

"Touch my pelt: it is soft. I kill cottonmouths, my teeth must be sharp. I will not bite you. The things which you fear are invented by you."

Selphie remembered something she had once said to Squall. "I admire all life that lives where we think it shouldn't.

"Do you think a possum's fur is soft? Does it bathe? Does it easily become ill? I worry for [this idea of] it. Does it have to defend its home from raccoon and their ilk?"

Squall had said, "I don't know. Answer your own questions."

And now Selphie realized she was a hypocrite, an awful, terrible hypocrite. She scorned those which she admired, she ran from her mother's betrayal, and she had left her friend who had helped her to face her fears to cower in her room alone. She looked for the opossum, and saw that it was drinking from her tap. She no longer cared, and entered her room to soothe.

It was pretty futile, but often presence means more than words. Squall was looking at the alarm clock that had fallen from Selphie's TV, and they glanced her way as she entered.

"Will you allow it to thrive here?" Squall asked.

"Would you like to live here?" Selphie asked instead. "Like, not under my house, but somewhere were you don't have to hide your car from cruel cops as you sleep, and somewhere were a shower is readily available?"

"I know you pick up strays because of your good heart," said Squall, "but giving to others will not protect you."

Selphie didn't answer. _You may hide beneath your thick skin and claws,_ she thought, _but they do not help you live to eat anything but the worms you dig up._


	7. ALLEGORICAL

A MEMORY OF WHEN SQUALL LEONHART HAD LAUGHED WITH JOY.

They walked with their mother along the sidewalk, before she had moved on. The morning was cool , the sun weak through light fog, and the greenery damp with dew. She knocked the branch above Squall so water spilled from the waxy green leaves like rain.

A PICTURE OF SELPHIE IN THE WORN LEATHER JACKET SHE SHOPLIFTED FROM AGRACE HOSPICE THRIFT SHOP WHEN THE ELDERLY VOLUNTEERS WEREN'T LOOKING

The sun set yellow in the crisp blue sky. The air was chill. Selphie's nose was caked in dandelion pollen as she looked through the scraggly skeleton trees to the cooling heavens. Squall ate simple Lays potato chips inside Selphie's home. The bathroom still had not been cleaned, and Squall was stuck waiting for Selphie to come in and work on it. Squall was moral support, not a maid. With every bite, they checked for insects – no longer did they trust the integrity of Selphie's house.

The opossum hung by its tail from the cabinet handles and said, "What do you think you're doing?"

"You know, adult possums can't do that. They are too burdened and will fall," said Squall.

"Young possums can do it," said the creature, "and I am timeless, so all attributes belong to me. Pride, dependence, the cry of the newborn, the wail of the mother, the keen of the dying."

Squall said, "Stop bullshitting me."

The opossum laughed and fell to the floor with a smack as the doorknob clicked and Selphie walked in. She had not eyes for the opossum; rather, the immediately focused on Squall's slightly oily face (the pores visible in the shadowed light). Selphie's features were dark in the silhouette of the sun's last rays behind her, but her nose was still noticeably pollen-yellow. Even as the opossum's claws scrabbled on the plastic fake-wood floor, she did not look away.

"I'm going to go clean the bathroom," said Selphie. She turned on the yellow light as she entered, and then shut the cheap wood door. Squall turned off the kitchen light, closed the curtains, and sat back down on Selphie's mother's bed to eat the rest of the chips. They could hear the opossum's flat feet trotting around beneath.


	8. MT DEW AND OUR INTERNAL CONSPIRACY

MOUNTAIN DEW IS A CONTROVERSIAL SUBJECT, AND WHAT THAT MEANS FOR US

You've noticed it too, right? If you bring it up, everyone suddenly has something they want to say on the matter. What it means? People buy into it.

Squall was sleeping in their car, streetlights cut through the black night, and tiny possum claws clicked on the kitchen vinyl beyond Selphie's door. The curtains were hush and still in the darkness, and the roar of cars gentle in the night. Dandelions shuttered their petals and trees rustled in the high breeze.

And Selphie was awake – not even the good awake either. Her blankets were soft and warm and familiar, true, and the electricity in the trailer hummed the siren song of "home," but she still felt disconnected in this place. She felt as much of a squatter as the opossum.

(Imagine how Squall must feel.)

And now we look at the phlegmatic possum, investigating the changes to its home, as it was. The scent of all the cleaning products burned its nose, but, in tandem, they smelled of catsfoot. The possum remembered the days when it was small, so small its passage only caused a strange disturbance in the tips of the grass above it, and it came upon a field of the same plant. Dark green leaves felt warm and dry in the summer sun, and the heat made the minty scent even stronger. Small purple flowers were everywhere, and bees flitted from one to another.

Even in the cool night of the present, the opossum felt warmer. It scuttled underneath the mattress, down to the hole in the floor, and padded through the dirt to the gap in the lattice. There, it rested its pointy possum snout on the grass, and looked to the few stars that could be seen through the light pollution, so far above.

"In fact, the entire possum species had no idea that there was light pollution at all. They have poor eyesight, and could only seen the brightest stars anyway, and barely even those," whispered Squall, deep in their dreams.

Selphie fell asleep as the possum closed its eyes. She dreamed of a fear of her past, that everything would be taken away in the future, manifested this time in a tornado. However, only a month before graduating high school and becoming an adult, she felt as though she had little to lose. And this was true.

\- AND NOW WE LOOK TO THE FUTURE,

wherein Squall ignores their awakening and dozes past noon, the possum sleeps even deeper, and Selphie returns to another day of school.

Imagine a Selphie in May in the school cafeteria. There is no air conditioning, so huge fans, taller than herself, push people's napkins off their tables. She talks with her friend (named Starfall, or at least so she calls herself) as her friend adds another Monster tab to their necklace laced with the same. The girl across the table, with the bright cherry-red hair, begins to raise her voice as she decries The Green Sludge to her neighbor. Naturally, this gains everyone's attention.

" _Speaks she so evil of Mountain Dew?_ " all think in unison. Many retaliate, but Selphie only retreats further and further.

When you live in a world built of ideas, there is nothing you can consider solid. First, you eliminate luxuries from the real, like unhealthy foods, decadent media, and all else you can contrive as excess. Watch us hate cell phones for their influences! However, if these are unnecessary and therefore worthless, then what is worthy? Our homes, when we could live in the wilderness? Medicine, which we survived without? Money, a convention that has little basis on real value, so unlike concrete trade? Yet, even these alternatives, imagining a Thoreauian paradise, are, too, unreal. Do we need them, truly? Trade, the wilderness, even surviving? Do we need life? Where is my rocky spirit home, without atmosphere, rocketing through the vacuum of space, following the expansion of the universe? Even the ground beneath my imaginary feet is superfluous, only one step away from none!

Accept your world and move forward instead of backward.

Of course, Selphie is far to insecure to do such a thing, as are the rest of us. And so we argue about the morals and worth of Mountain Dew and hate children born after us. All of this idea, reality and unreality and what is worthy or not, is self-defeating and stupid.

The Possum was not bound by love for humanity, however. It saw the past course of human history, with all its mistakes, and it saw all the mistakes propagated by by everything else that has ever lived on Earth. Even The Possum was not omniscient, but it saw enough through its half-blind possum eyes. The Possum was truly unreal – it was a mechanism of our trailer-dwelling opossum's mind – but it was contagious like a rare disease. The infection rate is low, but, if you contract it, it stays with you forever. Eventually, you fall to it.  
A remnant of the opossum and The Possum followed Selphie as she walked on dull school hallway tiles and underneath the waxy leafy trees above the sidewalk. She kicked a twig and a whisker brushed her cheek. The clouds flowed gray and, as she knelt down to pluck a half-closed dandelion, the remnant wove a budding one into her curls. As she slept, it whispered secrets in her ear. With love and care, all things blossom.  
Throughout, Squall remained in denial.

A/N: I woke up today with eye crust covering the entire left side of my face. Sorry for the long break in posting, and that anecdote in the middle. I almost deleted it, but the unrealities of this world are important to this story. Unfortunately, it didn't make much sense because I am having Language Problems lately... even though English is my first language...

05/06/2016


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